Category Archives: Atheism

Atheism, Religion

Can Secularists Survive Without Christianity?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Most secularists would laugh at this question, but not one. I ran across an article written a few years ago (thanks to the link provided by J. Warner Wallace) by an atheist,  John D. Steinrucken, that goes beyond acknowledging the debt secularists owes Christianity. He actually castigates those secularists who attack Christianity as irresponsible.

Steinrucken opens the article with this grenade:

Succinctly put: Western civilization’s survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

How so? Steinrucken goes on to make his case:

Although I am a secularist (atheist, if you will), I accept that the great majority of people would be morally and spiritually lost without religion. Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion? Is it not comforting to live in a community where the rule of law and fairness are respected? Would such be likely if Christianity were not there to provide a moral compass to the great majority? Do we secularists not benefit out of all proportion from a morally responsible society?

Steinrucken challenges secularists to provide a transcendent moral code for our society:

Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion. For the great majority in the West, it is the Judeo-Christian tradition which offers a template assuring a life of inner peace toward the world at large — a peace which translates to a workable liberal society.

Steinrucken admits that most men need God and reminds us that

so many of those who have forsaken the God of their fathers (it has been fashionable to do so) are now reaching for meaning in eastern exotica, new-age mumbo-jumbo, and other attempts to fill the spiritual hole.

He warns of the consequences of rejecting the Christian heritage of the West:

To the extent that Western elites distance themselves from their Judeo-Christian cultural heritage in favor of secular constructs, and as they give deference to a multicultural acceptance that all beliefs are of equal validity, they lose their will to defend against a determined attack from another culture, such as from militant Islam. For having destroyed the ancient faith of their people, they will have found themselves with nothing to defend.

What is Steinrucken’s advice to the atheist elites?

If the elitists of our Western civilization want to survive, then it is incumbent upon them to see to the preservation of the hoary, time-honored faith of the great majority of the people. This means that our elitists should see that their most valued vested interest is the preservation within our culture of Christianity and Judaism.

Steinrucken has recognized what Christians have been pointing out for centuries to those secularists who live amongst us: secularism is parasitic of the  Christian worldview. It incessantly borrows intellectual and moral capital from Christianity without ever admitting it is doing so. At least one secularist finally admits it. Hopefully the rest will come around.

Atheism, Top Ten Posts of 2012

Why Don’t Atheists Want There to Be a God? #4 Post of 2012

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

A common theme we have revisited on this blog is that the decision to believe in God or not believe in God is more than an intellectual exercise – there are always psychological and emotional factors at play as well.  This is contrary to the received wisdom of many atheists who argue that belief in God is about wish fulfillment and emotional neediness, and that atheism is arrived at primarily through rational analysis.  I have challenged this received wisdom many times on the blog, but sometimes it is helpful to review.

When thinking about this issue, it is especially enlightening to find well-known atheists in moments of candor explaining why they do not believe in God.  One such atheist is the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel.  Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, reports Nagel’s comments on the atheist “fear of religion.”  Nagel writes:

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.  It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief.  It’s that I hope there is no God!  I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.  My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism in our time.  One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind.

My frequent interactions with atheists over the last 9 years has also drawn me to the conclusion that more often than not, the cosmic authority problem, as Nagel puts it, is at the root of many atheist complaints about God.  Feser picks up this point after quoting Nagel:

It is true that a fear of death, a craving for cosmic justice, and a desire to see our lives as meaningful can lead us to want to believe that we have immortal souls specially created by a God who will reward or punish us for our deeds in this life.  But it is no less true that a desire to be free of traditional moral standards, and a fear of certain (real or imagined) political and social consequences of the truth of religious belief, can also lead us to want to believe that we are just clever animals with no purpose to our lives other than the purposes we choose to give them, and that there is no cosmic judge who will punish us for disobeying an objective moral law.

Feser concludes his thoughts:

Atheism, like religion, can often rest more on a will to believe than on dispassionate rational arguments.  Indeed, as the philosopher C.F.J. Martin has pointed out, the element of divine punishment – traditionally understood in the monotheistic religions as a sentence of eternal damnation in Hell – shows that atheism is hardly less plausibly motivated by wishful thinking than theism is.  For while it is hard to understand why someone would want to believe that he is in danger of everlasting hellfire, it is not at all hard to see why one would desperately want not to believe this.

Atheism, Morality

Can Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

The arch-atheist Friedrich Nietzsche certainly believed so, but atheists nowadays have largely disavowed their atheist fathers.  Atheists want to shake their reputation as depressing nihilists and instead tell the world how happy they are.  Freedom from religion is your ticket to joy and fulfillment.

In the UK, atheists paid for a bus campaign that featured the following message: “There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”  What a cheerful campaign!

Some in the atheist community, however, disagree with this dressing up of the atheist message.  Julian Baggini, writing for the Guardian, said recently, “Yes, life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that.”  Baggini, to his credit, thinks that atheists who tell people to forget God and just enjoy their lives are completely missing the point of atheism.

Baggini writes:

Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right. Can you really tell the parents who lost their child to a suicide after years of depression that they should stop worrying and enjoy life?

He continues:

Stressing the jolly side of atheism not only glosses over its harsher truths, it also disguises its unique selling point. The reason to be an atheist is not that it makes us feel better or gives us a more rewarding life. The reason to be an atheist is simply that there is no God and we would prefer to live in full recognition of that, accepting the consequences, even if it makes us less happy. The more brutal facts of life are harsher for us than they are for those who have a story to tell in which it all works out right in the end and even the most horrible suffering is part of a mystifying divine plan. If we don’t freely admit this, then we’ve betrayed the commitment to the naked truth that atheism has traditionally embraced.

Baggini finishes his essay by reminding atheists of the ever-present threat of nihilism that Nietzsche warned of.

Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the threat of moral nihilism. Atheists are quite rightly keen to counter the accusation that life without God cannot be moral. The British Humanist Association, for instance, claims that “Right and wrong can be explained by human nature alone and do not require religious teaching”. But, just as with happiness, there is a need to distinguish the possibility of atheist morality from its inevitable actuality. Anyone who thinks it’s easy to ground ethics either hasn’t done much moral philosophy or wasn’t concentrating when they did. Although morality is arguably just as murky for the religious, at least there is some bedrock belief that gives a reason to believe that morality is real and will prevail. In an atheist universe, morality can be rejected without external sanction at any point, and without a clear, compelling reason to believe in its reality, that’s exactly what will sometimes happen.

Read that last section carefully, because Baggini is arguing, as we have argued here many times, that atheists have a hard time grounding morality, much harder than the religious do.  Speaking to his atheists friends, he says, “Anyone who thinks it’s easy to ground ethics either hasn’t done much moral philosophy or wasn’t concentrating when they did.”

Baggini also admits that “in an atheist universe, morality can be rejected without external sanction at any point, and without a clear, compelling reason to believe in its reality, that’s exactly what will sometimes happen.”  In other words, on atheism, the ability to rationally reject morality is built into the system.  There is nothing that ultimately guarantees that morality can be grounded, and so an atheist who decides that morality is simply optional is within their rational rights to do so.  And, according to Baggini, that is exactly what sometimes happens.

Atheism, Evil, Pain, and Suffering

Do People Become Atheists for Only Intellectual Reasons?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, Russell quotes the famed philosopher John Stuart Mill writing about his father’s road to atheism.  In the previous post, we looked at the transmission of atheism from one generation to the next.  Today we look at another insight from Mill’s quote.

My father [says John Stuart Mill], educated in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflections been early led to reject not only the belief in Revelation but the foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion.  My father’s rejection of all that is called religious belief was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual.

He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.  His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to mere mental delusion but to a great moral evil.

What is interesting in this quotation is James Mill’s reason for becoming an atheist.  It wasn’t about primarily “logic and evidence,” but about a moral problem – the existence of evil.  For Mill, the existence of a morally perfect and infinitely powerful God is impossible given the evil in the world.  Here is a classical way to state this version of the problem of evil:

1. If God is all good, he would destroy evil.

2. If God is all powerful, he could destroy evil.

3. But evil is not destroyed.

4. Therefore, there is no such God.

How do theists respond to this argument?  Christian philosopher Norm Geisler offers the following solution in his Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (I’ve greatly abbreviated his solution below for space reasons):

Theism holds that even though God could not destroy (annihilate) all evil without destroying all good, nevertheless, he can and will defeat (overcome) all evil without destroying free choice.  The argument can be summarized as follows:

1. God is all good and desires to defeat evil.

2. God is all powerful and is able to defeat evil.

3. Evil is not yet defeated.

4. Therefore, it will one day be defeated.

The infinite power and perfection of God guarantee the eventual defeat of evil.  The fact that it is not yet accomplished in no way diminishes the certainty that it will be defeated.  Even though evil cannot be destroyed without destroying free choice, nonetheless, it can be overcome. . . .

Not only can a theistic God defeat evil, but he will do it.  We know this because he is all good and would want to defeat evil.  And because he is all-powerful and is able to defeat evil.  Therefore, he will do it.  The guarantee that evil will be overcome is the nature of the theistic God.

What is fascinating to me about Mill’s rejection of God is that it is not based on logic.  Philosophers of religion are virtually unanimous in concluding that the logical problem of evil, as stated above, is solvable by theists, and therefore does not demonstrate a true logical problem.

If Mill had used logic and reason, he might have discovered this for himself.  Instead, his failure to apply logic and reason to the problem of evil moved him to atheism.  In fact, as we’ve argued here before, it is difficult to even account for the existence of evil without a perfectly good God.

None of this is to deny that the problem of evil is a question that Christians must answer.  We must take this question seriously and explain how the Christian God can exist with the evil we see in the world.  Norm Geisler and many other Christian philosophers over the last 2,000 years have offered answers to this question.

We don’t know what James Mill concluded about the origins and persistence of evil, but it does look like he failed to consider logical solutions to the problem, and instead relied only on his moral intuitions.

Atheism, Religion

Is Atheism Transmitted from One Generation to the Next?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, Russell quotes the famed philosopher John Stuart Mill writing about his father’s road to atheism.  The quote is instructive for Christians as it gives a small glimpse into the world of a famed atheist.

My father [says John Stuart Mill], educated in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflections been early led to reject not only the belief in Revelation but the foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion.  My father’s rejection of all that is called religious belief was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. . . .

It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father’s ideas of duty to allow me to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and feelings respecting religion: and he impressed on me from the first that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known.

There is a lesson here about transmission of beliefs.  It is often claimed by atheists that religious views are merely transmitted from parent to child: we are simply born into our religion.  Atheists, on the other hand, come to their beliefs for mostly intellectual reasons, and are not born into their views.

In the case of James Mill, it appears he did buck the family religion and become an atheist against the teachings of his family.  However, if we read on we see that his son, John Stuart Mill, received his father’s atheism.  The younger Mill was clearly taught to be an atheist by his father.

What we can conclude is that in this case, one generation rejected its religious heritage, but the next did not reject its anti-religious heritage.  Mill’s experience is a great example of an atheist parent making sure that his child embraces his particular worldview.  

I’m sure some of you are wondering what the big deal is.  Of course atheist parents inculcate their beliefs into their children.  The reason I offer this quotation is because of the persistent claim that atheism is all about free thinkers bucking their family’s beliefs.  Perhaps this is true of some first-generation atheists raised in a religious family, but that first generation may choose, as James Mill did, to make sure no more free thinking happens with his children.

My guess is that atheist parents pass along their beliefs just like religious parents.  It is time to admit that Christian and atheist parents are pretty much in the same boat – we all want our children to embrace what we believe. 

If the term free thinker is to refer to people who reject their family’s heritage, then there are free thinkers from every religous and anti-religious persuasion (every group gains converts from outside their current community).  Atheists cannot lay sole claim to this moniker. 

There are more lessons to be learned from Mill’s quotation, and I will tackle those in the next post.

Atheism, Morality, Top Ten Posts of 2011

How Did Jeffrey Dahmer Define Morality? – #4 Post of 2011

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If morality is not grounded by a transcendent standard, a standard that is above all humanity, then it collapses to relativism.  This concept is not at all difficult to understand, but relativism retains a negative enough connotation these days that atheists, who deny a transcendent, objective standard of morality, are still squeamish about the word.

Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who gained notoriety for eating his victims, understood the connection between God and morality all too well.  Dahmer’s father recounted his son’s moral reasoning in a documentary produced in 1996: “If it all happens naturalistically, what’s the need for a God?  Can’t I set my own rules?  Who owns me?  I own myself.”

Exactly.  If there is no God, you have no accountability to anyone else at all.  You own yourself and you can do with yourself whatever you please.

In an interview in 1994, Dahmer himself explained his thinking.  He wondered that if there were no God and we all came “from the slime,” then “what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges?”

The fact that we all instinctively cry out at Dahmer’s behavior does nothing to take away from the fact that his reasoning is right on target.  He embodied the atheist worldview taken to its logical extremes.  You may not like what Dahmer did, but unless you believe in an objective, transcendent moral standard, he didn’t do anything but act unfashionably.

Atheism, Religion, Top Ten Posts of 2011

Are Answers to Ultimate Questions Dangerous? – #5 Post of 2011

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Four times in the past year I have heard the following kind of statement from atheists: “Religious people are dangerous because they think they have answers to ultimate questions.”  Twice these comments were uttered by personal friends of mine, and twice I heard them expressed by atheists in debates that I listened to via mp3.  The first few times I heard the comment I didn’t think much of it.  The fourth time, however, has bothered me enough that I need to respond.

What are the ultimate questions that religious people think they know the answers to?  Generally, these are questions like the following:

  1. Where did the universe come from?
  2. How do we know what is right and what is wrong?
  3. Does God exist?
  4. What happens to us after we die?
  5. What is the purpose of our lives?

Atheists seem to be alarmed by the fact that religious people think they have answers to these questions.  The argument is that people who think they have answers to these questions are often dogmatic, uninterested in reason, irrational, arrogant, and exclusionary.  The flip side of this argument is that people who claim to have no answers to these questions are open-minded, reasonable, rational, intellectually humble, and inclusionary.

The first thing that strikes me about this argument is that it is a bit disingenuous for atheists to claim they have no answers.  Many of the atheists I know seem quite sure that their answers to all five of the ultimate questions above are correct.  They can be just as dogmatic, unreasonable, irrational, arrogant, and exclusionary as the most extreme religious fundamentalist.  Just read through the atheist comments on my blog posts, and you’ll have all the data you need.

Secondly, it strikes me as strange that anyone would frown upon a person finding answers to ultimate questions.  After all, these are the kinds of questions that mark the major milestones of human life.  Birth, marriage, and death all inspire us to ask these questions.  Our judicial system and our political discourse wade deeply into these issues.  They are foundational to the human experience and they are what drive us forward in our pursuit of truth.  To tell a person that they should never think they have answers to these questions seems supremely cruel and unreasonable.  It’s like telling a man thirsting for water that there is no such thing as water – he must be content in his thirst.

Is there a legitimate point to be made by atheists?  Yes, but not about religious people, specifically.  The danger, in my opinion, is not that some people think they have answers to ultimate questions.  No, the danger is when a person has answers and they completely shut off their mind and refuse to consider any other views, whether that person is religious or not.  Those kind of people exist on all sides and I agree that they are worrying.

When thinking ceases, the search for truth ceases.  All of us have some false beliefs, and therefore we all need to be corrected.  If we refuse the chance to ever be shown our false beliefs, we endanger ourselves and everyone around us, for truth has consequences.  Here I can agree with my atheist friends.

Atheism, Top Ten Posts of 2011

Former Atheist and Dawkins Follower Becomes Christian – #8 Post of 2011

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Former atheist Richard Morgan describes his journey to Christianity in a fascinating article at The Christian Post.  Morgan participated heavily in the Richard Dawkins website forums, but what he found there turned him away from atheism to Christianity.

Here is an excerpt:

More than the religious debate, it was his interest in evolution that led him to follow Richard Dawkins. Upon finding the author’s actual website, Morgan was excited to communicate with scientists and philosophers who could offer more insight into evolution.

But rather than discussing the nature of evolution in the “oasis of clear thinking,” Morgan was horrified to discover in his first forum that more than half of the people devoted their time saying rude things about believers using extremely foul language.

Eventually Morgan witnessed a Scottish pastor, David Robertson, being attacked and abused constantly on the forum.

“I don’t know how many hours he must have spent just replying very calmly and politely to people who were sending out the most vilest insults and criticisms,” Morgan recalled. “He just kept coming back and occasionally with a few words of Scripture thrown into his general discourse.”

Please go read the article to find out what happened next…..

Atheism, Morality, Skeptics

If There Is No God, Why Be Good? Part 3

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the first 2 posts of this series, I presented Richard Dawkins’ “answer” to the question “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”  At the end of part 2, I said that Dawkins did not actually answer the question, even though that’s what he led the reader to believe he was going to do.  In order to understand why, let’s look back at his arguments.

Recall that Dawkins first argued against the alleged Christian claim that nobody would be good if there were no God to believe in.  Fear of divine wrath is the only thing that keeps mankind in check.

What’s wrong with this argument?  Well, first and foremost, I am unaware of any Christian scholar that has ever made this argument.  Dawkins is tilting at windmills.

I am perfectly willing to admit that atheists are capable of moral actions and I am perfectly willing to admit that Christians are capable of immoral actions.  There is no dispute on either point.  What Christians do claim is that a person who is dedicated to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior will improve morally, but Dawkins doesn’t even mention this claim.

Dawkins’ second argument was against the imaginary Christian apologist who says, in essence, that a person can only decide what is right or wrong by reading the Bible, a holy book which issues absolute moral commands.  Without a book like the Bible, there would be no way to decide between right and wrong.

Has Dawkins stopped tilting at windmills yet?  I’m afraid not.  Again, I am not aware of any apologist or Christian scholar who makes this argument.  Why?  Because the Bible itself clearly says in Romans 2:14-16 that every person is aware of the moral law, whether they have a holy book or not:

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.

Christians believe that God has written the basic moral law on every person’s conscience.  The Bible certainly contains what I would call advanced moral instruction, but the basics are known by everyone whether they read the Bible or not.  In fact, the Bible as we know it today wasn’t even available to Christians for hundreds of years after Jesus was resurrected, so a Christian claim that a person cannot make moral decisions without the Bible would be incredibly strange indeed.

Dawkins’ final argument, as explained in part 2 of the series, is that the Bible’s morality is outdated and “obnoxious.”  So, argues Dawkins, if the source of Christian morality is the Bible, and the Bible fails to give reasonable moral instruction, then the Bible cannot be needed for moral decision making.  Dawkins concludes that there is a human moral consensus, and that we as humans can make our moral decisions based on that consensus.

What was the question Dawkins set out to answer?  “If there is no God, why be good?”  I hope you can see that his conclusion completely fails to answer that question.  Why be good?  Dawkins answers that there is a moral consensus that we can use to make moral decisions.  Well, that’s nice, but that’s not the question.  We want to know why, rationally, should a person be good if there is no God.  It’s great that there is a moral consensus, but why should we follow it if there is no God?

On atheism, Professor Dawkins, give us a rational reason to follow the moral consensus without first just assuming that we should be moral (that’s called begging the question).  No such reason was ever offered in The God Delusion.  I wonder if Dawkins forgot that he even asked the question.

Atheism, Morality, Skeptics

If There Is No God, Why Be Good? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Dawkins’s next chapter, “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist” he “exposes” the Bible’s moral commands to be largely immoral and hopelessly outdated.  What the reader will find in this chapter is Dawkins riffing on how morally backward the Bible is.  In fact, Dawkins concludes that “those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it.”  Scriptural moral teachings, “if followed through religiously . . . , encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find—I can put it no more gently—obnoxious.”

What are these “obnoxious” biblical passages that Dawkins highlights?  If you’ve ever conversed with a skeptic before, the list is fairly standard.  He starts with the Noahic Flood, then moves to the story of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah, the story of the Levite concubine in Judges 19, the stories of Abraham lying about Sarah being his wife, the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac, and so forth and so on.

Dawkins also makes sure that his readers understand that the unpleasantness of the Bible carries over to the New Testament as well.  Dawkins accuses Jesus of teaching poor family values and God of sado-masochism.  Why?  Because “God incarnated himself as a man, Jesus, in order that he should be tortured and executed in atonement for the hereditary sin of Adam.”

Dawkins chronicles several other flaws of biblical moral teaching with the overall purpose of proving the Bible to be a complete disaster for moral instruction.  Again, none of these accusations are new to Dawkins.  I had personally seen almost all of them before ever reading The God Delusion.

If you’ll recall, we started out with a question that we hoped Dawkins would answer (hint: the title of the blog post).  Now we finally get to the payoff.  At the end of his biblical shop of horrors, Dawkins finally concludes his analysis of the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”  Here is his summary:

This chapter began by showing that we do not—even the religious among us—ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion. It extends, however, to most religious people, whether or not they think their morals come from scripture. With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don’t cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don’t cheat, don’t kill, don’t commit incest, don’t do things to others that we would not wish done to us. Some of these good principles can be found in holy books, but buried alongside much else that no decent person would wish to follow: and the holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.

There you have it.  Dawkins’ answer to the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?” is to say that there just is a wide consensus on morality.  Based on that consensus, we can come up with our own morality and, even more importantly to Dawkins, we do not need a holy book to tell us what to do.  That’s pretty much it.

Do you feel cheated?  Do you feel like he didn’t answer the question at all?  Join the club.  In the third post of this series, I will analyze Dawkins’ arguments to see where he went wrong.